Gap (Rebecca Jessen, UQP)

Ana escaped from an abusive home and got caught up with the wrong crowd, but pulled herself out of a slide into drugs and petty crime. Now she works two jobs to help her teenage sister, Indie, through school. Indie can’t live with their mother, whose dropkick boyfriend ‘made a groove in the couch/ with his ignorance’. Rebecca Jessen’s award-winning verse novelisation of her (also award-winning) short story opens with Ana attempting to cover up an accidental murder—‘now I’ve wasted/ years of getting back/ on track/ now I’ll spend years/ getting over it … my kid sister/ caught up in/ my mess again/ not too different/ to Mum after all’. The verse spills down the page like Ana’s fatalistic freefall away from hope. Will her ex-girlfriend, middle-class Sawyer the cop (‘her street/ where/ the lawns/ and the ladies/ have matching/ manicures’), help her or turn her in? Never flowery, Ana’s voice has a blunt idiomatic quality that demands an immediate reread after the first race-through. Like Dorothy Porter’s Monkey’s Mask, Gap crosses genres—lesbian, poetry, Australian literature—and would definitely appeal to the disaffected teen.

Viki Dun is editor of Gleebooks’ Gleaner

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Category: Reviews